Attention is directed to the liquid detergent compositions comprising benzyl alcohol and lower molecular weight (C.sub.1 -C.sub.3) diols, U.S. Pat. No. 4,414,128, Goffinet, issued Nov. 8, 1983. Liquid cleansers comprising benzyl alcohol, surfactant, builder, and mild abrasives are also known. The prior art, however, fails to teach or recognize the advantage of high MW diols in a liquid cleaner formulation.
General purpose household cleaning compositions for hard surfaces such as metal, glass, ceramic, plastic and linoleum surfaces, are commercially available in both powdered and liquid form. Powdered cleaning compositions consist mainly of builder or buffering salts such as phosphates, carbonates, silicates, etc., and although such compositions may display good inorganic soil removal, they can be deficient in cleaning ability on organic soils such as the calcium and/or magnesium salts of fatty acids, commonly called soap scum or bathtub soil, and grease/fatty/oily soils typically found in the domestic environment. Moreover, they are inconvenient to use since they must be predissolved in water for use.
Liquid cleaning compositions, on the other hand, have the great advantage that they can be applied to hard surfaces in neat or concentrated form so that a relatively high level of surfactant material is delivered directly to the soil. Moreover, it is a rather more straightforward task to incorporate high concentrations of anionic or nonionic surfactant in a liquid rather than a granular composition. For both these reasons, therefore, liquid cleaning compositions have the potential to provide superior soap scum, grease, and oily soil removal over powdered cleaning compositions.
Nevertheless, liquid cleaning compositions still suffer a number of drawbacks which can limit their consumer acceptability. Thus, they generally contain little or no detergency builder salts and consequently they tend to have poor cleaning performance on particulate soil and also lack "robustness" under varying water hardness levels. In addition, they can suffer problems of product form, in particular, inhomogeneity, lack of clarity, or inadequate viscosity characteristics for consumer use. Moreover, the higher in-product and in-use surfactant concentration necessary for improved grease handling raises problems of extensive suds formation requiring frequent rinsing and wiping on behalf of the consumer. Although oversudsing may be controlled to some extent by incorporating a suds-regulating material such as hydrophilic silica and/or silicone or soap, this in itself can raise problems of poor product stability and homogeneity and also problems associated with deposition of insoluble particulate or soap residues, particularly calcium scum, on the items or surfaces being cleaned, leading to filming, streaking and spotting.
It has now been determined that higher molecular weight diols incorporated into liquid cleaners can substantially improve their cleaning performance, without adversely impacting sudsing, filming, streaking or spotting.
One of the preferred diols of this invention is a well-known component of insect repellant compositions, another and its ester derivatives have been incorporated into plastics compositions. These diols, however, are believed to be novel in detergent compositions.